Duke Hutchings earns second U.S. patent

The patent granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office titled "Computer Desktop Use via Scaling of Displayed Objects with Shifts to the Periphery" was a collaborative effort between Hutchings and researchers George Robertson, Brian Meyers and Greg Smith of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash.

The invention, named Scalable Fabric, is a method of grouping and manipulating desktop windows on large-display computer systems. Hutchings specifically contributed to alternative input methods for controlling window management, including keyboard navigation.

In 2010, Hutchings and a group of researchers from Microsoft Research received a patent for TaskZones, a method of grouping and manipulating desktop windows on multiple-display computer systems using keyboard or mouse-like input devices.